"A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark."
-Dante Alighieri

SIUE SPARK (Scholarly Publications and Repository of Knowledge) is the "Institutional Repository" of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Institutional Repositories (IRs) bring together all of a University's research, scholarship, and creative output in one location to preserve and provide access to these materials for the benefit of other researchers and the general public.

The IR benefits SIUE faculty who deposit materials by making their work openly available worldwide to anyone with access to the Internet. Open access to research has shown to have advantages in scholarly "visibility" and number of citations, increasing the scholarly reputation of authors. Materials in SPARK are indexed in full text and search-engine-optimized for Google and other popular search engines, and a significant amount of traffic arrives at SPARK via Web searches. Authors who deposit in SPARK receive a monthly download report, and can visit a "dashboard" screen detailing their download counts, traffic sources, and even the search terms used to find their work.

IRs are an excellent vehicle for manuscripts or copies of published articles, conference papers, books, book chapters, and even images and audiovisual works. Presentations, dissertations, theses, senior projects, and other works not published elsewhere can also be published in the IR.

For more information, visit our SPARK Guide or contact the repository manager.